An odd disjunction today affects our experience of the movies. On the one hand, never have films been so accomplished, so technically glossy. On the other, they just do not seem to matter the way they once did. Some people have pointed to the pervasiveness of videotape, which has made film more available than ever, as a culprit here. The other side of plenitude, they say, is an obvious diminution of scale and scope; the moviegoing experience is constrained not only by the small compass of the television set but, in a subtler way, by the sense of movies as casual and ready-to-hand consumables rather than as special events.

More fundamentally still, movies no longer seem as central as they once did in defining our culture. Of course, popular and/ or controversial films still stir up much talk, but nothing to rival the urgency or the seriousness with which movies were discussed only a couple of decades ago. And not just discussed: it seemed then as if practically everyone with cultural aspirations wanted to be “into film,” whether as a writer, a director, or, for that matter, a critic. Indeed, writing about the movies had become, by the early 60’s, a respectable form of higher criticism, and even an academic discipline.

The notion of the movie critic as “consciousness-raising” guru is indissolubly linked to the name of Pauline Kael. In her generation-long career at the New Yorker, Kael acquired a following second to none among literate moviegoers (as well as a smaller, if fierce, chorus of detractors). When she retired in 1991, it was almost as if the prestige and authority of movie criticism went with her.

Now we have For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies,¹ a huge compendium of Kael’s reviews and essays. The volume consists of substantial selections from her earlier collections, including I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), Reeling (1976), and Movie Love (1991), plus her monograph on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (aptly named Raising Kane, 1971). She has announced that For Keeps is her last book—she is now in her seventies and in poor health—and so we have to take this hefty tome as a kind of statement, a last testament to what Kael meant for an era in which movies became the quintessential medium of cultural expression and the movie critic a gatekeeper of consciousness.

Kael traveled an unusual route for a future East-Coast urban intellectual. Born in 1919 on a farm near Petaluma, California, she grew up with an interest in the arts, trying her hand at music—she was apparently something of a budding violin prodigy—then playwriting, and finally film. After graduating from Berkeley, where she majored in philosophy, she wrote some radio plays, made a few short films, ran a couple of movie theaters, and composed notes for revivals of classic films. She first took up criticism while working for the Bay Area’s local Pacifica radio station (the ultra-liberal public-radio franchise).

The movie business may have been centered in California, but the business of journalism was centered in New York, and so by the mid-1960’s Kael made her move East. She wrote for a variety of national magazines, including the New Republic, before landing at the New Yorker in 1967, where by the next year she had cemented the position of chief reviewer.

At first blush, Kael and the New Yorker seemed a strange fit. Kael was famous for writing in a breezy, colloquial, even racy prose style, which at that time stood out oddly in the dry, chaste mold of the magazine. In the preface to this volume Kael herself wryly observes that she had many a fight with the late William Shawn, then the New Yorker’s editor, who was a sort of teetotaler in prose. Yet Shawn gave her a surprising amount of freedom. Or perhaps not so surprising—for Kael had the luck to start when the magazine itself was beginning to experiment in “relevance,” trying to keep up with the cultural ferment of the 60’s. The forty-something Kael was hardly a flower child, but she did bring a certain contemporaneity and with-it-ness which came to be much-prized by her fans.

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From the beginning of her reviewing career Kael cultivated a posture as the feisty defender of certain values. What she stood for was a kind of aesthetic purity in film which, in her view, was always being compromised, on the one hand by meretricious commercial interests and on the other hand by the middlebrow pretensions of many of her fellow critics and other “official” cultural arbiters.

In staking out her aesthetic position, Kael echoed many of the motifs of the 60’s counterculture—both in its lumpen and in its highbrow variants. Although she was not an ideologue in the usual political sense, her ideas about art were deeply informed by cultural ideology. Thus, in an age in which many intellectual pretenders affected disdain for conventional learning, Kael, too, was eager to show that she was no prim “schoolmarm”—as she styled the spirit of didacticism and love of “artsiness” that she found in such bourgeois precincts as the movie columns of the New York Times.

She aimed, in short, to shake up the establishment—by, among other things, championing the simple sensuous delights, even the trashiness, of moviegoing. For her, the bugaboos were well-intentioned films like those of Stanley Kramer (The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, etc.) that tried to draw attention to important social issues, and big “idea” movies, like 2001. In particular, Kael excoriated realism, which she called “the self-conscious striving for integrity of humorless, untalented people” and which she found “unendurably boring.”

Simple sensuality and lowbrow satisfactions were what, for Kael, were afforded by movies—the thrill of the chase, laughing at clownish antics, hissing the bad guys, cheering the good guys, and so on. But even while insisting that we accept what movies do best, namely, provide us with escapist entertainment, Kael also longed for something beyond, for true art. And what was true art at the movies? For Kael it turned out to embody the same qualities we enjoy in trash, but taken to a new level:

Movie art is not . . . to be found in a return to that official high culture [i.e., of middlebrows and schoolmarms], it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.

This is not quite a coherent manifesto from which to draw firm aesthetic principles or even canons of taste. But, especially in its celebration of the “subversive gesture,” it is once again very redolent of the cultural attitude of the 60’s avant-garde. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of that avant-garde was the rediscovery and celebration of surrealism and dadaism, particularly as expressed in that quintessential 60’s art form, the “happening.” The extent to which Kael endorsed this general sensibility may be gauged from the following, characteristic attack on films that express mainstream values:

Do even Disney movies or Doris Day movies do us lasting harm? . . . [I]t does seem to me that they affect the tone of a culture, that perhaps—and I don’t mean to be facetious—they may poison us collectively though they don’t injure us individually. There are women who want to see a world in which everything is pretty and cheerful and in which romance triumphs, . . . families who want movies to be an innocuous inspiration, a good example for the children (The Sound of Music, The Singing Nun). . . . These people are the reason slick, stale, rotting pictures make money; they’re the reason so few pictures are any good. And in that way, this terrible conformist culture does affect us all.

This was written in 1969, in the era of Charles Manson’s “helter-skelter,” anonymous snipers, riotous carnage in the streets, and skyrocketing crime rates—happenings, one might say, par excellence. Yet to Pauline Kael the greatest moral peril imaginable was not anomie, not social chaos, but social conformism: too many singing nuns.

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One genre that drew Kael’s particular ire was that of Westerns, which she condemned as shallow, hackneyed, and disingenuous, as if their sole purpose were to satisfy some primitive ritualistic need of the male mind. She was also very nasty about the “Dirty Harry” series in which Clint Eastwood plays a tough, no-nonsense San Francisco cop who will do whatever it takes to get the bad guys.

Reviewing the first of the series, Dirty Harry (1971), directed by the action-picture veteran Don Siegel, Kael conceded the movie’s virtues as a thriller but denounced it as “fascist.” She found it appalling that audiences cheered the Eastwood character as he flouted every liberal convention about criminals’ rights in order to stop a serial killer:

If crime were caused by super-evil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo; we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.

Kael here seemed shockingly ignorant of the facts behind the famous Supreme Court cases she cited that gave their names to new protections for criminal defendants. (Miranda in particular was a cute customer, who confessed to raping and kidnapping a young woman.) And though famous for her supposed astuteness about movie audiences, she showed no understanding whatsoever of the frustrations felt by ordinary people at the impotence of civil institutions in the face of social rapine—frustrations that a movie like this drew upon for its power.

But of course Kael’s own audience was not the excitable crowd filling the seats, it was the right-thinking crowd diligently reading her in the New Yorker every week. And here lay one secret of her success: she flattered her readers, confirming them in their superiority at once to the great unwashed and to such guardians of propriety as the staid, bourgeois Times. This far-out critic who applauded trash and the “subversive” gesture wrote, moreover, in a seductively easy manner, free of the pretentiousness of, say, the more austere and self-conscious Susan Sontag. In this way, and to a greater degree than any critic dealing with the arts for a major magazine, Pauline Kael helped to domesticate the attitudes of the 60’s avant-garde.

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Kael had another audience as well, in the new breed of actors and directors who came into their own in the 60’s as the final breakdown of the big studios led to unprecedented independence and artistic freedom. Instead of being essentially contract employees, actors and directors in the “New Hollywood” could now put together their own package deals. Kael was to laud their work—the work of new stars like Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Julie Christie, as well as of the already venerable Marlon Brando, and of new directors like Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, and Brian De Palma.

It was a happy coincidence of a critic’s enthusiasm finding ready objects of admiration in figures who were at the center of a new iconoclasm and an ironic, mocking sensibility. If the old Hollywood Left had wrapped its homilies in populist melodramas that were intended to appeal to basic decencies in the American people, the new group found nothing more risible, and nothing more derisory, than Americana. It envisioned typical middle-American values not just as so much corn but as pernicious myths, responsible for the stifling complacency, the conformity, the venality, and, at its worst, the harsh repressiveness of our society.

Kael waxed rhapsodic over Beatty’s first big-time star vehicle, Bonnie and Clyde (1967, directed by Arthur Penn), a third or fourth retelling of the sick little criminal history of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. In the review, Kael had her dukes up for the mainstream critics who reviled the film for glorifying violence and the nasty lives of these petty white-trash hoods. For her part, she earnestly compared this new treatment with that of Fritz Lang in You Only Live Once (1937, starring Spencer Tracy as the Clyde character), arguing that Lang’s version was the one that viewed the couple sympathetically, as decent folks gone astray, whereas Penn’s film showed Clyde—in Beatty’s mumbling, bumbling interpretation—as just a stupid rube with a vicious streak. This was disingenuous: the whole point of Penn’s movie was to do down the rubes and the squares among whom Bonnie and Clyde moved—in the backward rural America portrayed in the film, the yokels were glad to be photographed with the criminals just to get their moment of fame. Condescension was what this movie was about, and what Kael celebrated in her essay on it.

Sam Peckinpah was another favorite director of Kael’s—a bit surprising in light of Peckinpah’s reputation as the greatest choreographer of graphic violence in screen history. But the Peckinpah she liked was the Peckinpah of Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). What these two movies had in common was that they were both anti-Westerns, in which former adventurers and gunslingers were portrayed as aging, pathetic fools who—with the one shred of decency left to them—chose nihilistic destruction over the normal desuetude of life. This was the “poetic” Peckinpah, engaged in a quarrel with normalcy.

But then there was the “bad” Peckinpah: the maker of Straw Dogs (1971), a movie about an intellectual nerd who learns to become a man by killing off the vicious mob that attacks his home. It clearly caused Kael some distress to pan this movie, whose technical panache she went out of her way to praise. But like the “Dirty Harry” films, this, for her, was the work of a “fascist” aspect in Peckinpah, full of nonsense about blood-honor and primal rituals of manhood. That there might be an inescapable connection between Peckinpah’s “poetic” side and his “fascist” side was a thought she never entertained. It simply did not seem to occur to her that one can only go so far in trashing bourgeois values before crossing over to a more fundamental rejection of social order. She, at any rate, constantly danced away from the moral implications of her own flirtations with nihilism.

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It would be churlish and unfair to ignore Kael’s many gifts as a critic. Her style is highly readable and lively, if more than occasionally vulgar for no apparent reason. When she is especially engaged by a movie, she can render its atmosphere, and evoke the experience of watching it, with singular vividness. And she has perhaps the best eye in the business for those tiny nuances of performance that make film acting a unique skill: see her very fine appreciation—reprinted here—of Cary Grant, who for her was the supreme film actor (a judgment that cannot be far wrong).

Still, one also cannot ignore the role Kael played in encouraging cultural nihilism in the movies and thus in undercutting a certain kind of laudable artistic aspiration—call it serious-minded realism. Aided and abetted by a generation of 60’s elitists masquerading as experiential populists, she helped to plant the seeds of the contemporary mode of postmodernism, in which not only middle-class values but all values are kept floating in suspension, along with every artifact of culture, whether high or low: just so much junk to be endlessly cycled and recycled. To borrow from the title of Kael’s book, one can only hope that this moment, too, will not be “for keeps.” But as long as it lasts, the movies will continue to be less important to us than they once were.

¹ Dutton, 1,291 pp., $34.95.